A View From The Vicarage, May 2017

Dear Friends,

As I write this, it’s Easter Week and I feel that I must begin by expressing my sincere gratitude to everybody who participated in any way with our Lent and Holy Week Services this year, I’d particularly like to thank our musicians and choirs for their invaluable support. 

Not forgetting, of course, that incredible band of people who use their considerable skills and talents to beautify our churches with such splendid floral arrangements for our Easter Services.

The bright colour and fragrance of the flowers adding so much to the celebration after the long drab Lenten weeks which preceded them.  The flowers remind me of Winston Churchill’s observation on the Queen’s Wedding in 1947 that it was “a brief moment of colour.”  It seems to me that all of us need such brief moments of colour in our lives.  Occasions when we can exchange the mundane, ordinariness of life for a time of excitement and celebration.

The Christian calendar, of course, makes regular provision of such moments with Easter and Christmas being the supreme examples.  Yet, even within that calendar there are other, occasional moments which really do brighten up the sky for a brief moment.

One such moment will take place in Kington Church when we shall welcome Bishop Richard of Hereford to preside at a Confirmation Eucharist.

The people currently exploring confirmation will, in that Service make in public their willingness to follow Christ.  A moment of joy for them, their families and all of us who share that faith with them.

If that’s not enough to celebrate, the end of May will also mark another significant anniversary because Bryan Giddings will mark 70 years as a bellringer at Kington Church and it seems to me that that is very much something that we should celebrate as well.  Seven decades of dedication and commitment and until very recently that was also as a tower captain.

Please do join us in Kington as we celebrate with our Confirmation candidates and also give thanks for Bryan’s unstinting service ringing the bells at St. Mary’s Kington calling all who hear to remember the good news that God in Christ isn’t just a brief moment of colour.  It is colour for all of time and all of life.

Ben